Publishers are playing literary agents at their own game, seeking out new talent for themselves and cutting out the industry’s powerful middlemen.

Executives within HarperCollins, Jonathan Cape, Little, Brown, and Tinder Press are inviting “un-agented submissions”, marking a dramatic cultural shift for an industry having to readjust to developments such as self-publishing, as well as the often huge advances demanded by agents for coveted titles.

Next month Tinder Press, Headline publishing group’s literary imprint with authors such as Andrea Levy and Patrick Gale, is holding an “open submission” fortnight. Although its publisher, Mary-Anne Harrington, said the company was not abandoning agents, she added: “It could be that, between us, we’re perhaps drowning out other fresher voices.”

Acknowledging that publishers have suddenly become proactive, she added: “We all feel that it’s incumbent on us not just to sit waiting for agents to send us things. We have to take the initiative.”

As editorial director at Jonathan Cape, Alex Bowler invited “fiction of high calibre and imagination” with a single tweet. He is still wading through almost 5,000 manuscripts. Three have real promise, he claims.

Katie Espiner, publisher of HarperCollins’s new imprint, Borough Press, held an open submission after wondering why she was allowing other people to make decisions for her: “I wouldn’t do that in any other part of my life.”

The company’s open submission period last April produced one success from some 400 manuscripts. On 12 February, Espiner published a debut novel titled Galina Petrovna’s Three-Legged Dog Story, by Andrea Bennett.

Bennett, 45, from Ramsgate, who manages 4us2, a charity for disabled children, used to work as a Russian translator for investment banks. She submitted her novel to a dozen agents before hearing of HarperCollins’s open submission. Some never replied, although a couple sent “nice rejection letters … One sent a rejection about an hour after I’d sent her three chapters, so I don’t think she’d even read them. A bit dispiriting!”

Literary agents are also becoming more creative in seeking new writers. The Curtis Brown agency has a creative writing course that has found 15 debut novelists in two and a half years.

But Jonathan Lloyd, the agency’s chairman, is sceptical about the new publishers’ trend. “They don’t have the resources, time and energy to deal with the flood of manuscripts that they’re going to get. And they won’t be filtered.”